This is one of my brother’s early bands, The Eels, circa 1975. That’s brother Nick, doing a Harpo Marx kinda thing, second from left. He played the drums back then. (He can play about any instrument you put in his hands now.) Next to him on the couch is Chris the bass player, who was so laid back he was inside out. Last I heard, he was in some kind of metal band. And then another Chris, the temperamental genius guitarist and my ersatz brother. He and Nick were friends since elementary school and Chris spent a lot of time at our house. Sometimes I would get up late in the morning and there would be nobody in the house but Chris, sitting at our kitchen table, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes.

And on the far left, holding the inert warhead in what is known among those who know it as the “Warhead Picture” is Jerry Garcia. The other Jerry Garcia.

Jerry died last week and it’s given a lot of people a lot to think about. A lot of ambivalence surrounds his death, from hepatitis C and cirrhosis of the liver. As you might imagine, with those particular causes, his death is not entirely surprising but that doesn’t make it any less sad.

Jerry was charismatic, charming, talented and a drug addict. Gosh, that’s a cliché, isn’t it? After the Eels, he played with a couple of important bands in the NY punk scene—Richard Hell and the Voidoids and James White and the Blacks.

My friend Dave, who was close friends with Jerry from childhood, told me that when Jerry learned that he’d made it into the Voidoids, he went straight to Dave’s house and they jumped up and down and squealed like little girls.

But Jerry was a vortex of dissolution and over the years, he sabotaged himself—stealing from friends, band mates and professional associates, for example—and many (most? all?) of his friends dropped him.

One friend one time left a room leaving his wallet and Jerry alone. In the wallet was money and a note that said, “Take the money and never come back.”

At his best, Jerry was social, garrulous and a raconteur but that may be why he tried so hard to bring his friends into his drug-driven life. He liked people and didn’t want to do stuff alone. We all like friends around who share our interests. My family holds Jerry partly responsible for my brother Oliver’s descent into addiction and his ultimate death. I don’t think I ever saw Jerry again, after Oliver died in 1987, though I heard news of him now and then, none very good.

Jerry lived with his parents when he died. There was no funeral, just a viewing of the body. Dave went and a few other people. Just a handful. A small handful. After seeing what was left of Jerry, they all went out together and reminisced about Jerry’s good days, about the Jerry who charmed everyone around before he allowed himself to freefall.

Jerry was not an intimate of mine, although he was certainly part of a gang with which I ran. I still laugh to think of him telling me, when we were both older teenagers, that he likes Jewish girls “because they put out” –which is tawdry but funny anyway. (Jerry was Cuban.) I never put out for him though he once expressed a fleeting interest.

Drug addiction is so sad, so sad, so sad. It steals people away from us, sucks them into a cesspool from which many never emerge. Oliver was sucked down quickly. Jerry spun around and around into middle age before his body gave out.

Maybe Jerry was a bad person. I don’t know. He did a lot of bad things. But I think he was just broken, like Oliver. Now that he’s gone, his friends are mourning the person he once was and could have been. It’s a complicated sadness.

Labels: 1970s, death, drugs, memoir

I watched the movie Hair on AMC the other night. Some of you know that Hair holds a very special place in my heart. I was a stage door groupie for the Broadway show and even auditioned for it when I was, like, 12 years old. Yeah, really. No, I didn’t get a part.

Anyway, the movie wasn’t great and I haven’t seen it since it came out in 1979, but I was thrilled to see it listed the other night, when I was planning a solo late-night couch party. It was great fun.

Hair depicts the seismic societal changes of the late ‘60s but what the movie brought most strongly to my mind is the very distinct experience of growing up in the 1970s, when I went to see the show over and over, longing for the jubilance of the life of those who came just before me.

My cohort comprises the tail end of the baby boom (I was born in ’58, the boom is generally accepted as ’46-’64). Mine is one of those in-between generations, stuck in a muddy trench between the revolutionary idealism of the ‘60s and the brittle excess of the ‘80s. The 1970s were a dark time, when the drugs really kicked in and the pristine visions of the flower children started looking like snow in New York City, day two—gray with yellow spots and pocked with garbage. Maybe free sex and prodigious drugs weren't such a great idea after all. This was the decade when we figured that out.

A teenager through Watergate, I was acutely aware of it without entirely comprehending what was happening. I just breathed the sour air of corruption, mistrust and anger surrounding it. I didn’t know anyone who went to Vietnam (oddly, now that I think about it) but it flickers on the TV screens of my memories of those days. The nation was hit by inflation and the oil crisis and New York City was deep in the economic crapper.

Drugs and sex were seeping ever more deeply into popular culture but the sex was a lot less jubilant than it seems today. Nobody was used to sexual freedom yet and it all seemed a little bit tawdry--sex clubs and poppers and leather bars. I was too young to be a part of all that but I knew what was going on. (The famous sex club Plato’s Retreat was not very far from my home. Once, a man standing outside asked me if I would go in with him, no strings attached, because single men were not allowed in. I declined.)

Wedged between the nuclear family ‘50s and the loud reinvention of parenting that began in the ‘80s, many of my generation were untethered from their parents. I roamed New York freely, riding graffiti-covered subway cars; getting high with friends in the park, in friends' apartments while their parents were at work, in the staircases of apartment buildings if no place better could be found. I pretended to go to school in the morning but instead met a friend on a patch of grass near the West Side Highway, where we waited until our parents went to work so we could go back home.

That was the '70s NYC-style but I recognize the same style of sad and surly independence in the suburban teen lives depicted in the movie and book The Ice Storm. Tom, who was born in 1960, sees his Texas adolescence in Dazed and Confused—funnier by miles than the Ice Storm (which is devoid of humor) but not exactly depicting a generation on the fast track.

In some ways, the 1970s gave me a dark world view and chopped, diced and spliced my values into a strange amalgam of idealism and cynicism.

I don’t mistrust the government as deeply as some (perhaps the fact that Watergate was uncovered and punished inoculated me against total cynicism) but I believe it bears close watching and that voting is among our most significant responsibilities. I also believe that if newspapers go under, the great loss to society will be unbiased investigative reporting.

I think the era affected how I view sex and drugs. I’ve seen lots of casualties of drugs and so have less of a moral objection to them than a pragmatic one because they do some bad shit. I avoided the harder drugs many of my peers did. I never tripped, but I did do cocaine for a while. I don’t anymore because it killed my brother and I hold a grudge.

Coming of age while culture was in flux perhaps made me more broad minded, more flexible in my rules of morality (for better or worse), than those who came before or after. In general, I am forgiving of our darkest nature, tolerant of transgressions and raw in my assessment of human nature. I don’t think humans are bad. I just think we’re all a little fucked up. And that’s OK.

And, by the way, I miss the ‘70s desperately. Those are my good old days.

Labels: 1970s, baby boom, drugs, memoir, new york city, personal growth, sex